Of Ego and Pride
by May a Chance
Summary: His first child is powerless. So are the second, third, and fourth. It's six generations in that a success comes, and even thousand of years later he still doesn't have a child with powers. But he does have the Jedi.


His first child was a son, a little boy of Twi'lek heritage. He had turquoise head tails, and reddish eyes that flickered in the light. His name was Bering Sec'uura, and he was Ego's first failure. Powerless and painfully normal though he was, Bering lived on to have three children on Ryloth, each of whom was as powerless as their father. The firstborn named them after the three moons: Numa, Oola, and Sana.

They were Ego's first grandchildren.

Not once did he speak to them.

In the same generation as the three grandchildren was Inara, Mon Calamari with a smile that imitated the sun. Not once did she leave her home planet, and not once did she seem to desire to do so.

She, too, was powerless.

The third generation had seven great-grandchildren, two grandchildren, and two children. Of his eleven descendants, all were failures.

Six generations into Ego's exploration was a tiny success.

Little Josalette, the youngest and smallest of Ego's descendants, always knew when Ego was watching. She gazed at him with wide, purple eyes whenever a tendril of his conscience brushed past. She was a Nabooian, with hair the dark brown of the tree trunks, and skin the same dull copper of the stone. Over the course of her life, she made an impact on her tiny community but nothing more.

She was weak, just like the rest of them.

Ten generations in, hundreds of part-Celestial children and he had his most influential grandchild yet. Salomat became a senator of a tiny planet and passed with no children at the age of twenty-seven standard years, old for his short-living species.

In those ten generations, Ego amassed over seven hundred descendants, and of the living 100 or so, none had powers.

Josalette's great-great grandson, Valore, could lift things with only his mind. The power wasn't visible, and therefore as diluted as a drop of berry juice in a large glass of water, but it was there nonetheless. He did little with the power, left it behind and lived his life like everyone else on Naboo did, waiting for something significant.

Latara Tyst, who was Arkan and Ego's granddaughter, saw glimpses of the past, present and future.

By the time Ego had one hundred descendants (living and dead) with powers, two of them met.

A second generation Celestial by the name of J'dai met a nineteenth generation called Starling Jay; Ego had never spoken to either of them, but they were the first who met and that made them special.

Of all his thousands of descendants, they were the best and the brightest.

Their powers were well documented; recordings, written and oral records, and testimonies. J'dai could read minds and lift things, whether it was sending them flying or pulling them towards him. Starling, on the other hand, could pull emotions from objects and look from the eyes of whoever had touched that object. They were useful, the first powered individuals on record and eventually the ever-growing list of powered individuals was named after them.

The Jedi.

From there, the Jedi joined together.

They didn't make the planet that they chose, but it was beautiful nonetheless.

What they did make was the Temple, a stone building that grew towards the sky and hosted the Jedi easily. There were libraries and gyms, schools for the young and care for the old. Together they levitated the stones until they stacked together, and initially it was small, for a few hundred but within a hundred years they had learned how to find others, and Ego's descendants slowly came together. There were thousands of them, and those with that diluted power quickly became a family.

Their planet was located at the edge of the known galaxy, and at the edge of possibility. It was something they found and cultivated, made their own with subtle changes that made it safer and more hospitable for all. It was called Dantooine, with no native species and mostly consisting of plains, though in some areas immense forests towered into the sky. With plenty of liquid-water rain, and a nurturing sun, life flourished on the planet. The winds were gentle, sending the grass and flowers fluttering in the breeze.

The Jedi created a set of beliefs, almost a religion that dictated the way they acted. It said that there was chaos and order, peace and violence, love and hate.

Neutrality.

The only problem with his little cluster of descendants was their ability to sense his presence, and their suspicion of him. So they put up a public face, they told the galaxy that they were the peacekeepers of the galaxy, that they desired nothing more than to keep the peace and to watch others live happily. They were the perfect neutral, able to diffuse the situation with ease. They kept the balance between good and bad.

Ego knew nothing of them from that point forth.

They thrived like that, numbers increasing as the numbers of Ego's descendants grew. None were what he desired, and as a whole they were what he feat, a combined forth that believed in good and though him to be evil.

His descendants were adored by the people as saviours, protectors. Ego watched as his most recent children were raised on stories of their glory, and told of how a single Jedi had once saved an entire starship of people, and Ego watched as his children, young and sleepy as they were tucked into their beds, said, "Mama, will I ever be a Jedi?" He watched their mother's gentle smiles, telling the child tucked into their arms, "Sweetie, you can be anything that you want." It was a lie, of course. He had no child with powers, only descendants. He had no reason that there would ever be one, after so many thousands of children born as normal as their mothers.

For all that they were not what he desired in descendants, they still made him proud.

Ego had a great many children, and all were powerless, but the Jedi were his pride and joy.


End file.
